Wakefield's Offspring

Abstract

Of all the nineteenth-century books to have had a major impact on world history, perhaps the most unlikely was the 1829 collection of “letters” purported to have been written by a wealthy English settler in New South Wales, but which was actually composed by Edward Gibbon Wakefield (who had never visited Australia) while serving time in Newgate prison for kidnapping an heiress. A Letter from Sydney: The Principal Town of Australasia inaugurated a new period in the British understanding of its settler colonies. Imaginatively projecting himself onto a frontier he knew only from reading, Wakefield offered an original critique of the political economy of new societies, diagnosing a problem in the superfluity of territory to labor, and arguing that government control over the sale and distribution of land was needed to prevent European colonies from lapsing into barbarism. Wakefield contributed to the development of “systematic colonization,” helping establish assisted migration schemes to New Zealand and Australia, and affirming the legitimacy of mass population transfer during a period in which numerous Indigenous societies were dispossessed. With hindsight, A Letter from Sydney can be seen as a key early text in the economic, intellectual, and cultural analysis of settler colonies. In the last two decades, this subject has reemerged from the shadow of postcolonialism to become an important subfield of humanistic scholarship. Philip Steer's Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature: Economics and Political Identity in the Networks of Empire begins by considering Wakefield's cultural impact, and asks how nineteenth-century English literature was affected by what James Belich has called “the settler revolution.” In placing Wakefield front and center and tracing the permutations of metropolitan thought as it circulated through the networks of empire, Steer's work attests to the significance of settler colonialism as a driving force of modernity.Contemporary settler colonial studies has emerged from a long-running debate among postcolonial scholars about non-metropolitan white societies. Influential works like The Empire Writes Back (1989) synthesized evidence from both settler and non-settler contexts, highlighting commonalities in language use and cultural adaptation. But postcolonialism's comparative models sometimes had the effect of conflating non-white colonial subjects, who were materially oppressed and exploited by empire, with settlers, who were among its greatest beneficiaries. The implied temporality of coming after colonialism has always sat poorly with Indigenous scholars, who point out that they remain oppressed by precisely the settler nations now claiming to have transcended colonial status (Tuck and Yang). Scholars proposing the new paradigm have therefore tended to emphasize the specificities of settler colonialism as a political, economic, and cultural project distinct from other kinds of imperialism. Patrick Wolfe's Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology (1998), perhaps the subfield's foundational text, offers the following principle to distinguish settler colonies from other forms of exploitation on material grounds: settlers are, above all else, interested in appropriating natives' land, not their labor, and because of this, “settler colonies were (are) premised on the elimination of native societies. . . . The colonizers come to stay—invasion is a structure not an event” (Wolfe 2). In the work of Lorenzo Veracini, who helped found the journal Settler Colonial Studies in 2011, modern settlement exhibits a set of underlying economic, ideological, and narratological commonalities that flow from this fact, and that can best be elucidated through comparative analysis (see Veracini, Settler Colonialism; Settler Colonial Present). At its most ambitious—for instance, in James Belich's Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939—settler colonialism provides a key to understanding the transformative impact of capitalism on a global scale.Steer's book, read against its scholarly context, represents both the field's success in asserting the world-historical significance of the settler frontier, and a critique of the abstraction that has accompanied its structure-oriented methodologies. Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature acknowledges the distinctiveness of settler-colonial spaces, but argues that, in the Victorian period at least, the British metropole and its Australasian peripheries existed as an overlapping, entangled sociocultural and economic space, within which ideas and literary forms (not to mention capital) circulated in a nonlinear way. Steer rejects the implicit base-superstructure model implied by theories predicated on “a transhistorical, platonic notion of a settler state” (28), and he is eager to dispel the belief that cultural influence flowed in only one direction. Each of his four main chapters engages in nuanced, contextually informed readings of literary and political economy texts in order to identify moments in which “Victorian narrative forms” underwent “torqueing” under the pressures of Australian and New Zealand circumstances (8). Crucially, each chapter also shows how the resulting changes underwent “reverse migration” (187), reappearing in hitherto unrecognized ways back home. Steer's breadth of reference is impressive. The ideas that he shows to have metamorphosed in Victorian Australasia include the stadial theory of civilizational development, “character” (as a biographical and moral attribute), classical (production-oriented) economics, and military theory. He moves effortlessly between genres, juxtaposing books on prison reform and memoirs of the gold rushes to metropolitan novels by Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope, among others. The success of each specific argument is cumulative, as the book builds a case for seeing “literary form as a complex interface” via which “metropolitan and colonial spatial and social orders” were brought into conjunction, “ideological systems” were disseminated and contested, and the empire was imaginatively bound together by the century's end as a (somewhat) unified racial project (13). Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature argues, convincingly, that “British identity” was reimagined in the settler colonies, and that that process—which culminated in the enthusiastic enlistment of white Australian and New Zealand men for service in the Great War—had important literary and political consequences.Steer affirms what he calls the “historical attentiveness” of his project, which he contrasts to settler colonial studies' alleged tendency toward “dehistoricized criticism that potentially obscures the differences between different colonial spaces, while risking blindness to the changing local and geopolitical imperatives that continuously shaped each settler project” (27). As someone who earns an admonishing footnote from Steer for lacking historical rigor (28), I found his attention to the specificities of textual influence to be enlightening and convincing. The most brilliant chapter, “The Transportable Pip: Liberal Character, Territory and the Settled Subject,” links Victorian analysis of land use to the bildungsroman genre. As Steer argues, the stadial theory of civilizational development, itself the product of metropolitan reflection on an earlier phase of settler colonialism in North America, formed an unstable basis for conceptualizing how British identity would be affected by transplantation to the Australasian frontier. “The Victorian logic of character is . . . infused with the language of settlement” (37), in that the (capitalistic) moral virtues of self-control, self-reliance, and future-orientation were presumed to emerge only insofar as societies transcended their nomadic origins, acquired private property, and engaged in agricultural and mercantile production (38). As Wakefield pointed out in A Letter from Sydney, the superabundance of apparently unoccupied “waste” land in Australia posed a problem for this theory, in that it rendered capital investment largely profitless and encouraged “migratory habits” as workers eschewed wage labor to take farms of their own (47). Australian settler colonialism thus created a “paradox” for stadial theory: it purported to reconstitute an advanced, productive civilization in circumstances more conducive to “‘unsettled’ mobility” (53). Steer identifies how various thinkers responded to the crisis of British character. Colonial novelists like Thomas McCombie adapted the formal template of Sir Walter Scott's stadialist historical novels to accommodate the tensions between “realist” settler agriculture and “romantic” settler migration. Prison reformers like Alexander Maconochie proposed a new system of actuarial surveillance intended to transmute unsettled convicts into upstanding wage laborers. The chapter's great insight, however, is that these ideas returned to Britain and found (thus far unappreciated) expression with the most canonical Victorian of all. Steer provides compelling evidence that Dickens was influenced by Maconochie's carceral system, and through contrasting readings of David Copperfield (1850) and Great Expectations (1861), shows how the latter attests to the transformation of Dickens's conception of character as a result of what he had learned of Australia (67–76). Steer demands we reconsider the postcolonial reading of Great Expectations as an expression of metropolitan anxiety figured in the uncanniness of Magwitch. Steer's careful reconstruction of the intellectual climate suggests that, rather than a horrifying return of the repressed, Magwitch's bankrolling of Pip attests to the emergence of a new, deterritorialized notion of British character—a shift that “ultimately envisages a normative British subject with sufficient character strength to move with freedom between the metropole and the imperial periphery” (76).As this example suggests, psychoanalytically inflected theories of settler colonialism are another target of Steer's implied critique. He is not the first to propose that settlement generated anxiety concerning the moral status of British subjects—but previous analyses have usually framed those anxieties in (approximately) Freudian terms, examining the narrative knots that settlers tied themselves in as they tried to justify dispossessing Indigenous peoples while claiming indigeneity for themselves (see Johnston and Lawson; Hodge and Mishra; Turner; Calder). For Veracini, repression is the defining feature of settler-colonial culture. “Settler colonialism obscures the conditions of its own production,” he argues, “a recurrent need to disavow produces a circumstance where the actual operation of settler colonial practices is concealed behind other occurrences. . . . The settler hides behind the metropolitan coloniser, . . . behind the activities of settlers elsewhere, behind the persecuted, the migrant, even the refugee. . . . The settler hides behind his labour and hardship. . . . Most importantly, the peaceful settler hides behind the ethnic cleanser” (Settler Colonialism 14). It is therefore striking that Steer largely avoids alluding to concepts like screen memory, repression, denial, or disavowal. While he frequently identifies contradictions in metropolitan ideology, Steer, unlike many scholars working in the settler-colonial studies paradigm, does not connect those contradictions to the effects of (repressed) Indigenous resistance.The violence that attended the settler-colonial project is, in fact, largely peripheral to Steer's book. Chapters 1 and 2, which narrate how stadial ideology collapsed under frontier conditions, allude to the brutality with which settlers took control of Australia's limitless acres, but largely follow the lead of stadial theorists (from Locke onward) who disregarded native resistance. Indigenous people exist within these chapters as a concept rather than a material force. For example, Steer argues that the gold rushes rendered stadialism self-contradictory by enabling a form of economic development in which settlers “regressed” to nomadism—taking on the alleged attributes of Aboriginal people—and thereby generated rapid social progress (94). Settler recognition of actual Indigenous opposition becomes an important fact only in chapter 4, in which Steer describes how fin de siècle Australian and New Zealander men appropriated the history of Māori resistance in order to present themselves as preternaturally gifted in guerrilla warfare (174). This narrative sleight of hand occurred in the context of intensified inter-imperial tensions, as British subjects became concerned about Russian and German competition. Against the more common reading of settler indigenization as a way of delegitimizing native claims to territory, Steer thus presents the appropriation of Indigenous attributes as a response to the geopolitical anxiety that culminated in the Great War. This surprising recontextualization of one of the most significant elements of settler-colonial ideology culminates when Steer finally invokes Patrick Wolfe's most important and controversial claim: settler colonialism is necessarily predicated on the elimination of Indigenous peoples (200)—an argument Steer turns on its head: “If there is an uncanny element to the intimacy between settlement and death revealed on the rugged terrain of Gallipoli, it does not arise from a ‘native repressed’ external to the idea of colonial British identity. Instead, what becomes manifest in the slaughter . . . is somehow intrinsic to the idea of a settler identity, and to its perceived value within the empire” (200; emphasis added). If such an argument seems to recapitulate one of the most troubling features of settler-colonial thought—that the settlers, rather than Indigenous peoples, are the true victims of empire (see Curthoys)—Steer's abundance of evidence demands that we take his counterintuitive claims with the seriousness they deserve.I have presented Steer's book as a challenge to some dominant positions in settler colonial studies, but, in fact, apart from a few brief sections, he largely avoids theoretical debate. Such reticence reflects Steer's preference for granular “historical specificity” (28), and certainly aligns with an academic style that is winningly understated and admirably lucid. But I do wish he had been somewhat more direct in articulating the scholarly implications of his claims. The introductory chapter invites us to consider the book as a set of “key historical moments” rather than a singular narrative. But it is obvious that notwithstanding his modesty of tone, Steer is really advancing an original and ambitious account of how Victorian settler ideology evolved from Wakefield to the war. If the middle decades of the nineteenth century saw the intellectual hegemony of John Locke and Adam Smith challenged by what Belich calls “hypercolonization,” the end of the century witnessed the arrival of a racialized, white-supremacist Britishness poised for global conflict. In the introduction, Steer acknowledges that his method risks “occluding the history of encounter and conflict between indigenous and settler populations” (28), and in his autobiographical conclusion he regrets that “there are too many men in these pages, and all of them are British in some form or other” (204). The problem is that such apologies make the exact thrust of his argument unclear. His book seems to present settler-colonial ideology as largely self-contained in its circulation between metropole and peripheries, evolving in response to imperial priorities, of which Indigenous desires were not one. If this is indeed Steer's argument, it would stake an important position within a field that has often deployed rarefied literary theory in order to excavate Indigenous agency from the gaps of imperial discourse. Yet in his introduction, Steer acknowledges that “one of the deepest critical challenges of returning to the literature of the settler empire . . . has been finding means to avoid simply reinforcing the silences, obfuscations, and sheer ethnocentrism that structured and enabled those colonial visions” (28). If he has not found a solution to that challenge, he has nonetheless succeeded in demonstrating that the colonial frontier was an essential context for the development of Victorian culture.I doubt I am alone in finding Victorian literature hard to read without the intrusive awareness of what came next: inter-imperial cataclysm, nationalisms in the settler and non-settler worlds, modernism, decolonization, and the humbling of Britain as a global power. Like Steer, I was raised and largely educated in New Zealand, where settler-colonial history has for decades been filtered through the lenses of Pakeha cultural nationalism, Māori self-determination, and official biculturalism—perspectives from which the Victorians are ancestors to be transcended or repudiated, but never identified with. In that light, I always found the inscription on the small First World War monument near my childhood home perplexing, as it honors those “who died for our empire” (emphasis added). Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature is a triumphant demonstration of the power of nuanced historical analysis to illustrate the difference of the past and the contingency of our presentist concerns. Steer reminds us that for the Australian and New Zealand men who died at Gallipoli, as for the hordes of Wakefield's offspring who proceeded them across the oceans, the British Empire was a shared project. However differently we now view their actions—and the enormous harm they brought to Indigenous peoples—we must remain cognizant of that complicity.